Tenebrae
by cherithcutestory2
Summary: When the unthinkable happens, how will Annie cope? (COMPLETE).
1. Chapter 1

**CHAPTER ONE**

* * *

No meaning. No reason. No sense. _Senseless._

_Why? _

_Why? _

_Why?_

That one word, driving like the pistons of an engine, the engine of her Corvette, the engine of _Auggie's_ Corvette.

And the scarlet ribbons of Auggie's warm blood, twirling through her fingers, spooling out onto the concrete, running off the edge of the curb, and disappearing into the storm drain below.

_No! She doesn't want any part of him in that dark hole!_ She irrationally lunges to dam the stream of _all that blood_. But doing so would mean letting his head fall against the cold ground instead of resting in the soft valley of her lap, and she is even less willing to let that happen. She pulls back, but throws her face to the sky, so many tears escaping from underneath tightly closed eyelids. She commands herself with rock-hard jaw not to look down. But she has never been very good at listening to that voice in her head, the voice of warning, of self-preservation. She has always been mesmerized, hypnotized, magnetized to _this man, _now lying so perfectly still in her arms on the DC street corner.

She looks down.

He isn't meeting her eyes. Which is not new. But his gaze, always slightly unfocused, is now totally blank. Lips subtly parted. Such a dreadful silence and stillness to all his features. A sinister red flag unfurling across the front of his grey t-shirt. Something is ripping her open from the inside out, too, and she knows that it is the absolute certainty that he is _gone_.

Auggie is dead.

_No. No. No. No. No. _

This word replaces the "why," and it is more like a steam train. Annie wills its brakes to screech, its wheels to lock and then reverse. Go back. _Just go back two minutes and none of this is happening, dammit!_ But two minutes is all anyone needs to destroy an entire world. Her entire world.

Annie lets out a roar, a bellow, a keening. A primal sound she has never heard rushes from her mouth as though it is violently ripped from her. It, too, is senseless. She expects to see vital parts of her insides coming out with it, it comes from so deep and is so brutally extracted. A great pressure swells not from inside, but from without, and it is squeezing her skull so she can hardly see. She is compressing. She is imploding. She is blinding.

She becomes dreamily aware of the crowd beginning to gather around their macabre tableau. Annie & Auggie. Auggie & Annie. Someone touches her shoulder and she wants to rip the hand off the arm it belongs to. _"Don't touch me!"_ she screams in a stranger's voice, and she is prepared to use deadly force to back up the warning. The gun in her waistband, so useless two minutes ago, is perfectly capable of adding to the victim count tonight. And she has never felt so uninhibited by conscience or consequence. She is an animal in a trap, prehistoric savagery primed to burst through the flimsy palisades built over eons by civilization and her frontal cortex.

It is a very real possibility that Annie will reach for that gun if anyone tries to touch _him_.

Him. He. Hers. _Auggie_.

His handsome face is bathed in red, then white, then red, then white. And suddenly someone _is_ touching him, moving him. And Annie _doesn't_ reach for the gun.

No, because whatever it is that makes Annie Walker tick - _a soul? an intellect? a consciousness?_ - has drifted up like smoke, evaporated through her scalp, and escaped into the dark sky above.

There's simply nothing left.


	2. Chapter 2

**CHAPTER TWO **

* * *

Annie knows this is a mistake. There is nothing to be gained by being here. But again, she is drawn to him, wherever he is, whatever place he inhabits. She is a walking void, a vacuum, and she will always be. He is weight and center and gravity.

And _he_ is in the casket at the front of this sanctuary.

Slipping in like the ghost she was and is and will be, she keeps to the edges of the dank church's great stone forest. Columns thick as redwoods sprout from the floor across the chamber and uphold a ceiling distant as the sky. She glides behind one and uses its concrete trunk as cover. Peeking around, she watches the crowd of a hundred or so pay their respects to him.

Him. He. Hers. _Auggie_.

No tears breach the barrier of her dry eyes, no salty brine clots her makeup-less eyelashes. There is no her to cry. There is no _her_ to her. Not anymore.

A woman near the front, blonde head ducked and bobbing, is his mother, Annie knows. She is inconsolable, unable to be consoled. Even though the gray-haired man sitting sentinel at her right is trying. Three robust men sit to her left, one in the same mourning posture as his mother. Auggie's brothers, minus the one they lost so many years ago. She's never even met them. Should they run into her on the street, they would never recognize her. Since Auggie never took pictures, she is as anonymous here as she was in Geneva.

No, anonymous is not the right word. Anonymous assumes she is some _one_, some _person_, some _thing_. And she is not.

The service is short, the grief and senselessness too crushing for anyone to bear for more than a half hour. Annie watches as the groups either stroll or stagger out of the church, depending on how close they are to the tragedy. How close they are to Auggie. How close they _were_.

And she was the closest of them all.

After it empties, she allows the minutes to pass quietly in the cavernous space. It's just her...and _him_. She futilely wills her heart to physically leave her chest and join him bodily in the darkly lacquered coffin. Annie & Auggie. Auggie & Annie. There is no peace for her, no rest. But at least here, with what's left of him, she feels _still_. And that will have to suffice.

But when the brothers reenter the sanctuary with the clear intention of taking him from it, a force propels her forward so fast they all turn around in surprise at her stumbling approach. Her eyes are wide and now the tears do rise up in them, from a deeply secret cistern she hadn't known existed. She opens her mouth, but all that leaves it is the moist exhalation from her lungs, the carbon dioxide that is all that's left from her last breath. It may well be the first breath she's taken since the moment the nameless mugger stepped into their path exactly one week earlier, because she doesn't recall having breathed since then.

She knows she must look strange and may even be frightening them. Strapping men all of them, frozen with mouths like "O's" as they take in the brimming eyes, limp hair, dark boots. She's been keeping her hair dark since Hong Kong, unable to live fully in the skin of her previous avatar. She accepted a refurbished passport and driver's license, but in spirit has never returned to Annie Walker. Auggie had accepted this, learned to love the transitional form she indwelled for their brief six months of courageous love.

"Can I help you?" asks the darkest one.

No is the correct answer. So is yes. "I was a friend," is all she can manage.

The brothers regard her with hollow eyes that listlessly reflect her own. The tall one, the one with the glistening tracks running wetly down his cheeks, offers her a moment alone with Auggie before they "remove him." If she had eaten in the past 48 hours, she would have delivered up the contents of her stomach onto the stone floor at his words.

Instead, she makes a sound, a vaguely mammalian grunt, and they take it as a yes. The three of them move as a unit toward the narthex of the building. She watches them plod slowly away, the fatigue as obvious on their shoulders as a yoke, and takes note of a dark-haired woman just inside the doors of the sanctuary. She is watching Annie with startling green eyes, but she blessedly moves to take one of the brothers' arms, the fairest-haired one, as they exit.

It is as hard to walk to him now as it was to walk away from him that night. An orbit encircles him, and she is caught in it. She is whirling elliptically through the darkness around everything he is and was, but unable to change course even a degree, to get nearer to him, or farther away.

Helpless to approach, she wonders idly if he will be buried with his cane. Not _the_ cane, of course. Not the one his fingers clasped loosely as he died, the one that clattered gracelessly to the pavement as the EMTs somberly lifted his broken body. That cane, of course, is nested quietly in the leather folds of the small backpack slung over her left shoulder.

But she wonders if his family placed one of his others with him, one of a half-dozen or so he owned, all unique: either in the diameters of their braided cords, or the number of scuff marks on their flexible tubes, or the ends which resembled either a pool cue or a marshmallow. The artifacts of a disability he no longer has.

_But that's not really true_, she thinks dully. _All dead men are blind._

She hears a groan from the enormous wooden doors behind her and she prepares herself for a clearing of a throat, a scuffing of a shoe. Something these nice Midwestern boys will do to politely inform her that her time is up. That their time is up. Again, and finally.

Instead, though, her ears funnel in the sound of quietly approaching footsteps, the squeaking of hard-soled shoes on the glossy concrete floor. She turns and it's the woman from the doorway, the beautiful, dark-haired one. Annie knows her, but she is sure the woman doesn't know Annie.

"Annie," the woman says soft as a prayer, and it is not a question. Annie's arms go numb with the debilitating, illogical fear that she has been blown. _But this is not an op!_ her logical mind yells at her instinctual one. She imperceptibly clenches her fists at her sides, hidden inside her baggy coatsleeves, encouraging the blood to reenter the tingling cells in her palms and fingertips.

But since she is not Annie anymore, she says nothing.

In place of an answer, she lets her eyes trace over the woman's familiar features. His brother's wife, she'd radiantly smiled from the foreground of a wedding photo Annie had once found in a drawer at Auggie's apartment.

"Did this happen because of his work?" the woman whispers, her tearful eyes twin lagoons of swirling turquoise.

Annie reappraises the woman before her, drawing down her eyebrows in skepticism and uncertainty.

"It's okay," the woman pronounces tonelessly. "I knew."

She knows. So, Annie doesn't have to lie to her. Not that Annie gives a shit anymore what Langley wants. They eviscerated her, mined all the ore and left her stripped and gaping and empty. She hasn't seen or spoken to anyone from the Agency since she and Auggie quit together a week after returning from Hong Kong.

So of course she suspected them when it happened. Unbearable grief and unspeakable loss had bloomed into suspicion and rage. In the end, it would have been better if it had been the CIA. At least there would have been a reason why the beating heart of her existence was silenced forever, locked in a thick wooden box ten feet in front of her.

"No," Annie answers quietly. "We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"We?" repeats the woman breathlessly, and Annie realizes she has unintentionally given something away. "You were there?" she asks, her pretty face twisting into a grimace of pain and shock.

Annie lets her direct gaze answer for her, and the woman's full eyes spill forth a brook of tears.


	3. Chapter 3

**CHAPTER THREE**

* * *

Annie lies on the floor of the bathroom. Palms up, hair a dark corona around her face, nude. The floor underneath her is unyeilding, which would matter if she cared about things like physical comfort anymore.

In the next room lies a body that is cooling as rapidly as the tile beneath her is warming.

He had been so easy to hunt. A metaphor slinks into her mind, that of a housecat being deposited on the great green expanse of the Masai Mara. The man in the next room is that housecat. _Was_ that housecat. And she is the leopardess who stalked and effortlessly killed him.

If she'd had any persisting suspicion that the CIA had been behind Auggie's murder, she knows now for sure that they weren't. The man had been a low-rent hustler, a thug. An online posting with a seductive photo and an invitation for _some fun!_ had been all that was needed to bring him mewing to her door. He hadn't even recognized her when she'd met him at the cheap motel in the bad part of town. _Stupid, stupid kitty cat._

She rehearses all the steps she needs to take to sanitize the room. The pilled sheets, the smoke-stained wallpaper, the ragged carpet - that's not her concern. It's the blood, every drop of it, that she needs to make vanish.

In a moment of carelessness, her psyche falters and she abruptly remembers Auggie's blood, spilling freely into her cupped palms, and gasps as the grief vivisects her once again. She writhes on the floor, unable to breathe. Unable to think of anything except the liquid weight of the red cells, the white cells, the plasma and the platelets; every precious drop of it as it flooded out of his body, taking all his thoughts, memories, and hopes with it. Wetly flowing from the gaping wound in his chest. The wound he'd received the moment he'd placed his own heart in front of hers. His protective instinct for her honed far beyond what his eyes couldn't perceive, he'd somehow known there was a gun, that she was in danger. In the space of five seconds, the man had shot, grabbed Annie's purse, and fled.

And now he is dead. Like Auggie. Like Annie & Auggie. Auggie & Annie.

She considers who she'll be now. Nothing about continuing to live is appealing. And yet...

...she lifts one hand from the floor and draws it slowly to her abdomen. Dances her fingertips to the hidden rise that is pressing up from within the dip of her pelvis. It is impossibly subtle, undetectable to anyone but her. Anyone but her and the blind man who had known the contours of her body like the planes of his own face.

Him. He. Hers. _Auggie_.

And now, _theirs_.


End file.
